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The Office PC Slims Down

(Quelle: Wall Street Journal)

More companies are giving workers 'thin' computers-saving money and making it easier to track and restrict how employees use their machines.

By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Is the personal computer a little too personal?

Growing numbers of companies and government agencies seem to think so. Traditional desktop PCs put so much power in employees' hands that they can do all kinds of mischief, from wasting time on the Web to accidentally downloading viruses. Meanwhile, fleets of PCs are expensive to upgrade and maintain.

So organizations are taking PCs off people's desktops and replacing them with "thin client" systems. Each worker gets a computer screen, keyboard and mouse. But a central computer room stores all the data and does most of the processing-slashing support costs and making it much easier to track and restrict how workers use their machines.

Thin clients have come and gone over the years. Now they're enjoying a revival as the cost of maintaining networks rises and employers are flooded with demands for tighter security and record-keeping. Bob O'Donnell, director of personal technology for IDC, a market-research firm in Framingham, Mass., predicts that by 2008 thin clients will account for nearly 10% of the market for desktop computers at large and medium-size companies, up from about 5.4% this year.

Slimming Expenses

The number and variety of thin clients available has been rising. But in general, thin clients' appeal isn't only lower purchase costs.

The main savings come in managing the desktops. When employees can't slip in virus-laden floppy disks, and the computer professionals can upgrade security protection and add new programs at the touch of a button in the computer room, maintenance costs decline sharply. And the total cost of ownership drops in turn.

For computer-industry veterans, the growing interest in thin clients sounds like back to the future. Before the International Business Machines Corp. PC came along in 1981, virtually all corporate desktop computers were terminals networked to central mainframes or minicomputers. Documents were produced on back-room printers.

The PC revolutionized the model by giving virtually every office worker a machine of his or her own with a disk drive to store information, and often a dedicated printer. But during the early 1990s, running PCs got more expensive. Companies increasingly hooked them up in networks linked to central computers, to take advantage of services such as e-mail-and that meant hiring more technicians to manage the complexity.

So vendors started pitching centralized computing again. Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle Corp., and Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, advocated variations on network computing in which central computer rooms would again become the data repositories.

The proposals were convenient for them, since they were bitter rivals of PC software giant Microsoft Corp. Even better, neither Sun nor Oracle stood to lose, because they don't make PCs. But PC prices plunged faster than those of network computers, and few customers saw a reason to switch.

Windows and Beyond

In recent years, the computer-virus epidemic and security breaches have made some corporate computer chiefs conclude that getting computers off employees' desktops might be a good idea.

In addition, for many corporations, Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and health-care privacy laws argue for tighter control of corporate-employee computing. Managers, for example, may need to track down all e-mails between employees and clients in case of lawsuits. That can be difficult if some data are stored only on a desktop PC, or if the employee has loaded an instant-message package, which doesn't store old messages, to communicate with clients.

The Pentagon is also turning to thin clients to improve security, switching some 30,000 users in various intelligence services from Windows-based servers to thin clients.

Ryan Durante, program manager, says that currently, some users have up to "13 different Dells or Compaqs under their desks," each connected to a computer network with a different level of security. Every group of coalition allies has its own secure network, and every new network requires a new PC. After the transition to thin clients, users will simply have a thin client and a PC that connects to the Internet.

Mr. Durante says that users are initially alarmed when they lose their myriad PCs, but when they see "all the networks on the screen at the same time, the reaction is, 'Holy Cow!'".

In other cases, managers want better control of what an employee is doing, and thin clients make it easy to ensure that employees aren't surfing the Internet for porn or bidding for items on eBay. In a standard corporate network, managers could theoretically see which Internet sites workers have been visiting, but they often don't take the trouble to look at each individual PC's surfing history. With thin clients, it's easy for the company to limit in advance how employees use the Net, by permitting access only to certain sites, for example.

Then there's convenience. W.S. Badcock Corp., a 330-store retail chain based in Mulberry, Fla., installed thin clients so that clerks in remote stores could log in on a shared kiosk and track vacation days or change details of their health-insurance plan, such as adding a newborn child.

"The thin client is an excellent device for that," says Veryl White, director of technology infrastructure. "You have security. Everyone has a unique sign-on. They can print. When they turn it off, it's done," and no record stays behind for snoopers. Badcock also decided to use thin clients as point-of-sale terminals, rather than using more-standard Windows-based cash registers.

Software Savings

Software is another important consideration. In many cases, companies that switch to thin clients simply don't need the full complement of pricey Windows software that they would get bundled with a regular desktop PC. Workers with well-defined tasks, including many in government, health care, manufacturing and retail, often can get by with just one or two of Microsoft's programs-and sometimes less expensive open-source tools work just as well.

Thin clients offer the chance for further software savings with "concurrent user licenses." Under these arrangements, companies pay software makers based on the maximum number of people who will actually use the product simultaneously. So if only a handful of employees use a program regularly, a company doesn't have to pay a license for every employee.

In Illinois, Cook County installed thin clients for some 2,300 employees in Chicago and five suburban courthouses to replace an outdated computer system. Dorothy Brown, clerk of the court, says the court saved a bundle by buying a license that allows 200 employees to use the Citrix operating system at once, and run Microsoft Word and Excel. If every employee had a regular desktop PC with a full suite of Windows software, the court would have had to buy 2,300 separate licenses.

"That's a huge savings," says Craig Wimberly, the court's chief information officer. And it's technically simpler as well: "You can adjust the number of concurrent users" without having to install software on new machines, he says.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Durante says that software cost savings are paying for the switch to thin clients. In part, that's because users now need only two licenses for Microsoft Office—one for their thin client and another for their Internet PC-instead of separate licenses for a host of PCs.

"Getting rid of Office wasn't an option," Mr. Durante notes. "You can't run a war without PowerPoint."

Mr. Bulkeley is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau.

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